Leveraging video in b-to-b marketing

There is no denying the importance of video in our daily lives. With over 50 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute and over 4 billion views a day, the medium has skyrocketed and is arguably Google's best acquisition in the company's history. We all use video in our personal lives—everything from learning how to deal with bee's nests to sharing videos of the kids with Grandma. Yet, we seem to forget that business leaders use video, too. According to Eloqua, 75% of senior business leaders view work-related videos regularly.

Undoubtedly, there are a handful of leaders in the b-to-b content marketing world who have jumped onto the video bandwagon and are leveraging the medium, but the majority of the b-to-b world lags our b-to-c counterparts. Corning has an exceptionally well-produced video that has garnered over 22 million views. Most of us are familiar with Blendtec lighthearted viral video efforts and what their videos have done for their predominantly commercial sales efforts. And, Grasshopper took light-hearted to a new level while garnering 1.3 million views with its parody video. All of these are impressive results, but they pale by comparison to the likes of our b-to-c counterpart's video of Matt with over 50 million views.

A 2012 study by Aberdeen shows a 15% gap for the best-in-class marketers in b-to-b usage of video vs. all others. Further, the Aberdeen study shows a 32% delta between best-in-class marketers and all others in their likelihood to distribute their video assets across multiple channels including email marketing. There are several studies that point to higher open rates in email marketing that contain embedded video. Email marketing company Implix issued a study citing, "emails containing video received, on average, 5.6% higher open rates, and 96.3% higher CTRs than non-video mails."

So whether it's thought leadership, a lift in email open rates, product demonstrations, pre-event marketing, or just trying to give your company a personality through the most dynamic digital medium available, I believe that b-to-b marketers need to better leverage video in their content marketing efforts. We should not fall prey to the belief that video is the domain of the b-to-c marketer.